Commentary

Anne Plested, head of Fidessa's EU Regulation Change programme, has written a short blog arguing that although we should be thankful that ESMA have taken a pragmatic approach to moving things along, more bottlenecks could appear in the future.

The report, which was published earlier this year, added: "Overall our estimates for 2000 suggest that Italy almost sextupled from 40,000 accounts, the United Kingdom quadrupled from 70,000, France tripled from 140,000 accounts and Germany, the largest market, grew 150 percent from 800,000 accounts."

The most interesting aspect, says the report, is that a greater proportion of growth in the fourth quarter appeared to come from the migration of offline accounts online.